Are you the kind of person who can’t remember the name of someone who just introduced themselves ten seconds ago? Maybe you can’t get somewhere you’ve been a dozen times without the help of GPS. Perhaps you’re just easily distracted and have entrepreneurial ADD. How do you cut through the clutter to focus and succeed in the 21st century?

Celebrity memory coach Jim Kwik shows you how to measurably focus and improve your memory to advance your career, increase your influence, become an expert in your field, and remember the people you meet every day. Listen, learn, and enjoy!

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Ever feel like there’s something wrong with you because you can’t remember seemingly simple bits of information when it matters — like names of people immediately after introductions, phone numbers of your ten closest family members and friends, addresses to places you’ve been dozens of times, the street where you grew up, or your anniversary?

Information overload is a by-product of the 21st century that most of us deal with in some way or another. But relying on technology to help us juggle this dizzying array of information comes with its own set of risks, brain coach Jim Kwik explains.

“I find that one of the biggest challenges is we’re outsourcing our brains to our smart devices and we can no longer do simple tasks. Like right now, it keeps our phone numbers, it keeps our to-dos, we use it for math, to keep our schedules.

“And so our mind is — it’s kind of like a muscle. It grows stronger with use, but it’s use it or lose it. And we find a lot of people aren’t getting the exercise that they would normally be able to get.”

While it’s convenient to have Google at our fingertips for information about anything under the sun, smartphones for easy access to everyone on the planet, and GPS that ensures we never make a wrong turn on the morning commute, we’re also becoming more susceptible to what doctors are calling digital dementia.

“They’re not getting early detection of brain aging challenges because of things like GPS,” says Jim. “Because if you’re using a third-party device to tell you where and when to turn, you’re not realizing when you would normally have memory lapses — you’re not going to the doctor to get checked out.”

But that’s not all. Consider how your ability to make decisions on the fly declines if you have to stop and look up information every time you need to choose your next step forward — whether you’re an entrepreneur plotting business strategy or the grocery wrangler in charge of making sure there’s enough food on the table when the family assembles for dinner.

“Yes, you could look up facts and figures and all that stuff on search engines,” Jim says. “But let’s take the opposite. If you lost fifty percent of your memories, how efficient would you be? If you forgot fifty percent of the names, fifty percent of the facts, fifty percent of the words that you know the definitions for. We would be impotent in a lot of ways.

“And so on the same token, if you can increase it, you have that much more power and that much more productivity to be able to make things better.”

So how do we start the process of taking back our brains from the machines? It’s in understanding that we don’t need to be geniuses in order to memorize and retain the things we’ve been leaving to our smartphones and the Internet. In fact, Jim himself grew up with learning challenges that stemmed from head trauma he suffered as a child.

“I had no focus, no memory,” says Jim. “Things would have to be repeated for me to comprehend it. It took me an extra few years to learn how to even read, which is really challenging.”

Listen to this episode of The Art of Charm in its entirety to learn more about how Jim overcame his early learning challenges and a fear of public speaking to become a memory mogul who finds himself speaking on stages all over the world, strategies for learning anything faster, the FAST method, remembering with MOM, how we can increase our recall and retention, how to learn and remember names and other data or ideas, and lots more.

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AJ Harbinger is one of the world’s top relationship development experts. His company, The Art of Charm, is a leading training facility for top performers that want to overcome social anxiety, develop social capital and build relationships of the highest quality.
Raised by a single father, AJ felt a strong desire to learn about relationships and the elements that make them successful. However, this interest went largely untapped for many years. Following the path set out for him by his family, AJ studied biology in college and went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at the University of Michigan. It was at this time that he began to feel immense pressure from the cancer lab he worked in and began to explore other outlets for expression. It was at this point that The Art of Charm Podcast was born.
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